I hope the Masters is never made into a ranking event. Its prestige comes from the fact that it is purely for the elite top 16, a reward for being the best players in the world, and long may that continue.

The Masters has always produced more high class finals than any other event, even the world championship. From 1989-1996 Hendry defined this tournament. 1997 gave us the immensely satisfying pretender against the old master, and 1998 was one of the most exciting finals I have ever seen. A couple of close finals in 1999/2000, and then came the thrilling Paul Hunter years. 2006 gave us possibly the highest quality final ever played, while 2005 and 2007 produced virtuoso performances. The last few finals haven't been particularly memorable (and 2009 was painfully slow), but the Masters has been the circuit's showpiece event for the best part of twenty years. Hopefully it will produce another classic final in the not too distant future...

No wildcards needed because at one dark point in snookers history the rankings moved so slowly it was like Usain Bolt attempting to run through industrial treacle to make an impression on the lazy and/or obese fat cats at the top of the tree.This was endorsed by their managers who took proxy votes from top 32 or top 64 players latterly who wanted nothing to change ranking wise to endorse their own sponsorship deals and line their own pockets to the detriment of the game.These days the rankings move fluidly both up and down to reflect rankings which means that wildcards are passe and unrequired unless someone wants to take the game back tio the dim and distant past.Hope this helps to understand the histroy of the game to both 5.46pm and 7.32pm.

It's my understanding (please correct me if I am wrong) that in order to invest in Eurosport one has to sign up to packages of rubbish programmes that would never be watched!As an OAP I could not afford or justify that.

I don't know about other snooker fans, but I'd rather he apologised for not putting in the effort when people have paid good money to watch him play, but World Snooker doesn't seem that bothered about the casual fraud he perpetrates in this regard. As for the rape comment, obviously playing in a PTC for 10k is not like being raped so it was a pointless an analogy, but I don't really like seeing someone strong-armed into apologising for voicing an opinion. No point having freedom of speech if we are going to make people apologise for every silly/offensive comment they make, it's just another type of censorship.

If people don't enjoy sitting at their computer monitor for hours watching online snooker there is possible another alternative now. You could sign up for the internet Eurosport player or the World Snooker equivalent and use a set-top box to stream it to your TV:

The "Boxee Box" claims to stream anything you can watch in your browser to your TV:

So in theory, if you watch live snooker on your PC you should be able to watch it on your TV with that box. At £180 it's no walk in the park, but I don't know how good the picture quality will be blown up to full TV size, but I think this could be the way forward for people who want to watch snooker on TV but don't want a Sky/Virgin package. Since there seems to be limitless snooker online these days, in theory that box would make it limitless on your TV too. Obviously it's expensive, but at least it's not an ongoing financial commitment.

To be honest I don't know why they don't just put proper internet in TV now. There's more to watch on the web than there is on broadcast stations so why not just make it easy for people? People shouldn't have to run cables from their computers or buy a box.